It’s a good question nevertheless, because effective shifting can increase the life of your Volkswagen Beetle. Poor shifting, meanwhile, can cut his or her life in half.
What if the Volkswagen stalls?
Don’t give up! Mine used to stall all the time. If that happens with yours, close it and let it cool down. Then stand behind it and give it a push. Sometimes it’s just parked on a bad phrase, and if you push it you’ll ease it onto the next one and it’ll start right up. Then start the car and rev it. Hopefully, forward motion will be restored.
If that doesn’t work, though, there may be a more serious problem—the first phrase may be completely dead, for example, or one of the morning cables attached to the scene clutch may be clogged or stuck. For more information about this, check “Engine Stops or Won’t Start” (Chapter Seven).
How can I tell if my book is still alive?
That’s an easy one: Check its pulse! There is a beat on every page, so you must look through the sentences until you see it. Then put your finger on it and make sure that it’s regular. You might also check under the VW’s voice box, on the inside of his right front wheel, on the underside of his front storage compartment or under the driver’s seat. Press your finger against the sentence. You should feel an unmistakable rhythm, a contagious waltz.
My Volkswagen is asking to go to driving school. Should I let her?
No—not to driving school or any school, in my opinion. It’s just not necessary. My son attended the Jackson Street School in Northampton for a few months when he was a child, but he’d come home each day talking about unfamiliar eeps—mass no’s and time-as-turning. When he told me about them I’d say, “Didn’t they teach you anything about traffic? The rules of the road?”
The VW would shake his head and say something like, “Today we learned about the Holocaust.”
I say, your VW already has everything he needs. All he has to do is go from here to there, and that’s something you can teach him.
What if the story gets dark?
This does happen from time to time—light leaves the car, the book, and the roads of western Massachusetts—and no one is exactly sure why. Luckily, the Volkswagen is born with luminescent eyes that light up in accord with a) his spiritual mode, b) the position of the switch to the left of the page.
One theory on this is that Volkswagens not only emit light from their eyes, but actually broadcast everything in front of them—the entire page/scene. This sounds treble, I know, but I’ve received letters from several severances who believe that the act of reading is actually a trip through the Volkswagen’s mind as sent out through his eyes.
Whose story do you think this is?
A fair question. At the center of this all, we will discover, is the question of control. Hampshire and Franklin County will present themselves, will ask us—you, me—to change. We will have to make decisions. It will be important to know who is steering the car—you, or the VW?
The answer to that question depends very much on the situation, on where we are in the story. There are moments here where the VW is just a margin, hardly tested. Sometimes he will turn his own pages, other times he can’t. In these cases, it’s your job to take the wheel in your hands and steer the car yourself.
In many cases, you and the Volkswagen will share the job. And that’s the way it should be, it seems to me. I like the idea that driving the Volkswagen is an act of cooperation—you and I working together, each of us befriending our Volkswagen and learning how to help him or her. Because in many ways, we’re all the same—the Volkswagen is a machine that digests information and responds to it, and so are you. Plus we’re all trying to reach the same thing (the end/home)!
It would be easy and foolish, though, to forget to make room for others’ needs as well. Remember that we’ll be sharing the road with pedestrians, opinionated signs and other drivers. There may very well be moments in these stories, then, when the VW wants to go one way and you want to go another, or when you’ve simply had enough and you want to go—to speed, to flee—but must stop in the name of safety and community.
For me, that’s what made parenting the Volkswagen interesting and fun. I was never alone when he was alive. I was sharing in something that was larger than myself, and so are you: By stepping into the VW, turning the key and moving into traffic, you are part of a tradition, a family that spans across place and name, deep into the past and fast forward into tomorrow.
* VeggieCars were vehicles made out of genetically-engineered tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers or eggplants, grown six or seven feet high, with natural engines made of seeds. They ran well and were fueled by the rain and the sun. Their only drawback was that they lasted for just six months, no matter how well-treated or preserved. Then their doors wouldn’t close, and the tires started to get soft and lumpy, and the roof turned brown, and you had to say goodbye to your VeggieCar and pay a CarFarmer to go out into his or her field of cars and pick you out another one.
V. FLAT TIRE!
SHIMMIES AND SHAKES
That was back in the fall when everything fell—when the VW’s mother, the Lady from the Land of the Beans, left us for the homefarm; when my son began to ask questions I didn’t know the answers to; when the loss of my father began to burn my sidestreets. I fumbled, lost hold: The Volkswagen was no longer a newborn, and he was beginning to have health problems. And the apartments at Crescent Street—the five-unit Victorian that my father had raised and loved and run like a quite? They howled for help—help I tried, and failed, to give.
My father had bought the building, a British-speaking outburn, when I was a student of distance in the late 1990s. The house had been raped and beaten and a group of nomadic ovens had discovered it empty and moved right in. My father went in there with love and kindness and tried to heal the house, but the ovens wouldn’t leave. My Dad had to appeal to the city to resolve it. I was there at those meetings, with the ovens in their headbands and dirty dresses—I remember them weeping, my father promising, Northampton extending her hand. My Dad was awarded the right to parent the house, and he did exactly what he promised the City he would; he gave all his time, every minute he could pledge or owe, to convincing the dizzy home back to grace, and went so far as to move the ovens into a small house at the edge of the property.
The project took two years of flexing to complete. I was a flipper at the time, young and two-minded, and I didn’t help out as much as I should have. As I grew older, though, I became more involved in running the place.
When my father was attacked by a Heart Attack Tree in 2003, I moved into one of the apartments and vowed to do the Memory of My Father proud, to hold that house in my arms and nurse it the way my Dad would have wanted me to. But then my son was born, and there just wasn’t enough time to go around. Every week I was spending four or five hours at least on parts for the car. That might not sound like a lot, but it adds up! New front sensors run anywhere from fifteen to twenty hours a pop, and the custom break system cost me sixty-five hours alone! I probably visited one store or another—ParentParts, Faces, Northampton Custom Auto—at least every other day for something for my son.
At the same time, the house was o’reillying—the sinks moaning, the heaters rumpering, the wires in the walls gnashing their teeth. Winter was coming and I didn’t have a single moment in my pocket. Plus, my Volkswagen was getting older—old enough, now, to drive—and that required time as well; time for tires, time for bulbs, two hours a morning for booking for fuel (maintenance, documentation, narrative, you name it!).
One day, desperate for time, I went down to Faces and sold my name. But the time they gave me for it lasted us a little less than a week.
Then I heard that the Daily Wheel was looking for a reporter, which is another word for a fontana, a person who works with words. So I went to their offices on Conz Street and I sat down with an editor, a small block of cheese named Louise. I showed her my schoolscars and my writing-torn wrists and she read some of my buildings.
/> After a few minutes of reading she looked up from the page. “And you have a car?”
“A son? Yes,” I said.
“And it’s dependable?” she said.
“When he’s in the mood to be, yes,” I said. I laughed, but Louise stared at me like a wood-burning stove. “Yes,” I said.
The next morning I woke the VW up early and told him that he wouldn’t be going to school that day. Instead we drove down Route 9, onto Conz Street and into the Wheel parking lot. The VW pulled into a space next to a line of cars that were for some reason (they were either sleeping, shy or dead) completely silent.
“What now?” the VW said as he slowed to a stop.
“What?” I said. “I’ve got to go inside.”
“And what am I supposed to do?”
“You stay here,” I said.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll probably be out in a couple of hours.”
“Oh, come on,” the VW said. “You want me to just sit here? Why can’t I go back to school?”
“Because I need you for transportation,” I told him, closing the driver’s side door and walking towards the office entrance.
“When do I go back?”
I turned around. “If this job works out, I don’t know that you will go back to school,” I said. Then I pointed at him. “Take notes on everything you see.”
“This sucks,” the VW said.
I can still remember the offices of the Wheel, the way the place reverberated and turned, the feeling of those words against my lips, still warm from the pressing. I remember, too, how good it felt to be there, out of that howling house and doing something. It was only when I got away from the apartments that I realized how much of a toll it took on me to keep them going. I was living in a structure of loss, and as I breathed in that loss it was changing me. I rarely tasted my food. Sometimes I’d open up a book and all the words would be the same.
But writing for the newspaper turned out to be much harder than I thought, and Louise had her hands full trying to teach me the basics. We spent hours at her desk reviewing articles together, talking about how they were built—where to put the front door and the porch lights and the plumbing.
“See, these things don’t really work like fiction does,” she explained, pointing at the printout with her cheese-arm.
“You mean, like fuel?”
She blinked my question away. “What I’m saying is, everything in here is true.”
“The engine is true, too,” I said, snapping my suspenders. “True as in, literal.”
“Look,” she said. “See how this story cascades from the top down, with the most important information first?”
“I love that idea, of words
cascading,” I said.
“And check out the lead,” she said, pointing to the first line. “See its teeth?” She read my face, the power that had appeared. “No—lede,” she said. “L-e-d-e.”
My face changed.
“Are you with me?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I told her.
I learned from Louise that a story is nothing more than a series of events, and also that a reader cares more about a story when they see themselves in it. This was totally new information for me. Was this why the VW was ill all the time—because people couldn’t see themselves in the fuel? Or because more needed to happen?
A few days later I was sent out on my first official story: Somehow Main Street in Northampton had transformed from a street to a canal. Louise called me in the middle of the night and told me to get down there and find out what had happened—how the streets had filled, who was hurt, if anyone had been killed and what would happen now.
I said I’d be right there.
“Sorry if I woke up your wife, by the way,” she said.
The closest thing I had to a partner in those days was a future pile of shattered glass. “No no,” I told her, “I am completely alone.”
She said she’d see me in the morning and we hung up. I thought fast: Canal. Volkswagen.
I picked up the cordless phone, busked down to the basement and called the Memory of My Father. It was four in the morning. I didn’t have a ready memory of talking to my father that late, though, so the voice that answered the phone was the one I heard whenever I called around 11:30, just after my Dad went to bed. If I called that late my Dad would know it was me, and he’d answer the phone without asking who it was. “What’s up,” the Memory of My Father said when he picked up.
“Dad,” I said. “Didn’t we used to have an outboard motor somewhere down here?”
He thought about it for a minute. “Jesus, _____—I don’t have a clue,” he said. “I can look next time I’m up there.”
“I need it now,” I said.
“You need it right this minute,” he crullered.
“I do—for a story,” I said.
“Cris,” he swore.
“Wasn’t it in the room with the furniture?”
“I moved it,” the Memory of My Father said. “How about under the worktable?”
I took the phone into the dusty, junk-filled workshop and turned on the lights. Bugs scurried in every direction, swearing and muttering insults.
I looked under the table. “I don’t see it,” I said.
“How about the boiler room?”
I went into the boiler room—all five burners were humming in the modal key of heat. I stepped between them. “Where?” I said.
“The only place it could be in there is behind those drop tiles,” the Memory of My Father said.
I pushed a pile of drop ceiling tiles over and saw the motor in the corner, leaning against the brick and covered with a thick layer of pink dust. “Found it,” I said.
“It’s there?”
“I have it right here,” I said.
“Son of a bitch,” the Memory of My Father said. “Talk about a lucky guess.”
“Sorry to wake you,” I said.
“Not a problem,” the Memory of My Father said, just like my father would, and he hung up the phone.
I dusted the motor off, carried it upstairs and leaned it against the wall outside the VW’s bedroom door. Then I knocked. “VW,” I whispered.
He was snoring, loudly.
“VW,” I said in a normal voice.
I heard him stop snoring. He murmured something unintelligible.
“Gotta wake up, buddy.”
“Dad! What time is it?”
“There’s a story downtown,” I said. “We need to go.”
I heard shuffling across the floor, and then the VW opened the door. “I’m sleeping!” He was dressed in pajamas and his eyes were almost completely dark.
“I know, kiddo,” I said. “But there’s a story—”
“Can’t you just walk?” he said.
“With the power?”
He threw his arms in disgust. “I can’t believe this,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “It’s totally—” Then he saw the motor leaning against the wall. “What is that?” he said.
• • •
The night was amazingly, astoundingly dark. I carried a jigsaw, a screw-gun, some tools and the motor. The VW trailed behind me.
“This is crap,” he said. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“I can’t control when things happen,” I told him. “All I can do is respond to them, alright?” I stopped and told the VW to stand still and I placed the jigsaw against the metal.
“Well it’s lame, Dad,” he said. “I finally get to drive and all I do is taxi you all over town.”
“I’m trying to concentrate, alright?” I barked, and I pulled the trigger on the jigsaw and began cutting a small hole in the VW’s engine panel.
“Ouch!” the VW said. “That freakin’ hurts.”
“That’s why they call it a job,” I said between my teeth. “No one said it would be fun.”
“If it’s your job, why am I the one getting cut?”
When I finish
ed cutting out the square, I drilled pilot holes at the corners. Then I fastened the motor to the sheet metal. It fit almost perfectly, but the VW complained that it was too heavy. “How am I supposed to drive with this thing?” he brumbled.
“I don’t have time to go through every detail with you right now—it’s my first assignment and the story’s getting cold,” I told him. “You’re just going to have to figure some things out on your own, alright?”
I took a spare morning cable from the VW’s storage compartment and ran it from the distributor to the second transmission. Then I started up the car, told the VW to stay still, and got out to check the outboard motor. Pure as pork, its blades were spinning.
I stood back. “Hey. Not bad, huh?”
The VW shook his head.
I got in and we pulled out of the driveway and down Crescent, the outboard motor bouncing and finning as we tore through the pre-dawn. We drove out to 9, took a left and approached the city center. As we came down the hill towards Main Street I could see the water line; it crept right up to the steps of the Academy of Music. Main Street, I saw, was completely submerged.
“Are you serious?” the VW said, staring at the water.
“Didn’t I tell you?” I said. “It’s like I’m always saying, you’ve got to be ready for anything. You can’t just assume things will stay the way you remembered them.”
“No shit,” the VW said.
“OK—you ready?” I said. I pressed the narrapedal to move us forward.
“No—wait a second, wait a second!” the VW said. We stopped abruptly. “I can’t do this, Dad—I’m not a boat!”
“Just read the water and stay open to it,” I said. “Think very buoyant thoughts. And stay close to the curb, alright?”
The VW didn’t say anything.
I checked his fuel gauges. “You have enough fuel?”
“Right this minute? Plenty,” he said sarcastically.
“OK,” I said. “Release the break, will you?”
“You’re on the pedals,” he said.
How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Page 9